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Thousands of people flood Ground Zero May 1 to celebrate the news that Osama bin Laden had been killed by U.S. troops in Pakistan. (Image by Getty Images via @daylife.)

President Obama deserves a modicum of praise for finally allowing a team of U.S. Navy Seals to kill mass-murderer and al Qaeda kingpin Osama bin Laden last weekend, but only disdain for delaying the operation for so long, and harsh condemnation for extolling “extraordinary sacrifice” at his Ground Zero visit. Like his feckless predecessor, Mr. Obama deserves the lowest grade for continuing to appease political-militant Islam, as evidenced by the tender care and deep respect he bestowed on bin Laden during the burial at sea.

“Shameful” is the only word fit to describe a U.S. foreign policy that did nothing to bin Laden after 2005, when he first occupied his conspicuous compound in Abbottabad, just 30 miles from Pakistan’s capitol and close to the Pakistan Military Academy, which counted among its notable visitors U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Pakistan’s foreign minister Salman Bashir told the BBC recently that in mid-2009 his nation’s intelligence services (ISI) told the Obama regime about bin Laden’s not-so-secret hide-out.

The CIA and Pentagon gave Mr. Obama a specific raid plan last August, yet he dithered and remained reluctant to take military action. In time it’ll likely be revealed that Mr. Obama gave the go-ahead only because he feared leaks would reveal him to be weak and appeasing.

Of course, Barack Obama isn’t the only U.S. president who hoped to give bin Laden a pass. Only a few months after Sept. 11 President Bush learned that bin Laden had been cornered in Tora Bora (Afghanistan), yet he wasn’t captured or killed because the U.S. military was too distant. Why? Mr. Bush and Pentagon officials didn’t want to convey U.S. assertiveness or offend the dissident group, Northern Alliance, and so decided to have U.S. soldiers and equipment move in the wake of the group’s slow-moving cavalcade of donkeys.

In the late 1990s, even after the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, President Clinton refused an offer by Sudan to arrest bin Laden, fearful of Saudi Arabia’s warning that it would cause a Muslim “backlash.” In May 1998, just before al Qaeda bombed U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, bin Laden overtly declared jihad against America in an interview with John Miller of ABC News. Clinton later authorized the CIA to use deadly force against bin Laden and a cruise missile to strike his camp in Afghanistan, but lamely, to no avail.

These efforts were half-hearted and ultimately proved futile in large part because each of these U.S. presidents has loudly proclaimed that Islam is really a “good and peaceful religion,” and in part because their Christian religion instructs them to appease evil. In Matthew 5:39 their Lord tells them “do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.” In Ezekiel 33:11 they read their Lord declare “I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way and live.” In a brief but telling interview from the White House the day after Sept. 11, President Bush declared, misty-eyed, “I’m a Christian man, but I also have a Constitutional duty to defend this country.”